


Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying

by istia



Category: The Professionals (TV 1977)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, POV William Bodie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-19 21:52:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18979060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/istia/pseuds/istia
Summary: Bodie faces a familiar dilemma when a mission goes wrong.





	Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying


    Your heart may be broken tonight
    But tomorrow in the morning light
    Don't let the sun catch you crying
    
          --Gerry and the Pacemakers, "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying"

He had his orders.

He excelled at following orders. His stepfather's hard right hand had taught him that lesson early on. He'd used to escape from the house, from the sight of his mum's pale cheeks and sad eyes and the sour smell of her bastard husband's liquored breath, down to the docks. Always the docks, like a bloody homing pigeon. She'd always known where to find him, but she never told his stepfather and the arsehole had been too dull-witted and uncaring to suss it out, so the docks were his home and his hiding place. Sometimes he'd made a few pence running errands, a secret cache for sweets and stupid kiddie things he'd coveted that his stepfather would've had a belly laugh at him for wanting if he'd ever let slip his desires.

Other times, he'd just sat on the damp, rough planks and looked down the Mersey towards the sea. He'd stared across the heaving, uncaring grey waves with the gulls' keening cries in his ears till his eyes were red and sore.

He wasn't daft; hadn't been even as a kid. He'd known his da wasn't ever coming back, and if the wind blew stinging salt spray onto his cheeks, he accepted it as camouflage and kept his eyes trained on the empty horizon.

And no hard right hand or rough words or spat orders could stop him running the fantasy in his head any time he wanted, like going to a private cinema and choosing his own sea story: The one where a beaten-up old freighter limped into port and his da limped down the gangplank, as battered as the ship and the handsomest sight in the world, his eyes blue as the sea in a picture book and his hair raven black and his smile like the sun itself come out from behind the clouds. Nobody could wrestle that private fantasy from him, and he'd run to its comfort continuously till he'd reached his teens and other options opened up for him.

He'd wiggled himself into his own budding sea career soon as he could manage it, left home with a kiss to his mother's worn cheek and never a lingering look. His first ship's captain had been like his stepfather all over again, only without the liquor and the meanness: a hardness in his experienced case that came from knowing the only safety for all on board a ship in the middle of the ocean was discipline. With his dead da's example always in mind, he'd learnt that lesson well and quickly. He'd followed orders without hesitation when they came from the captain or the 2nd mate; from anyone he reckoned was reliable and true. He was more cautious with the 1st mate, long as the man lasted: the captain discharged him after their second voyage and promoted the 2nd mate.

He'd learnt everything these men from his father's world could teach him, then took the discipline and parlayed it into a career in foreign places as a fighter for hire. Another wandering life, this time on land, but an existence equally dependent on knowing your job and knowing when it was crucial to obey orders to work efficiently as a group to successfully achieve the goal. Even if the goal then was just their pay at the end of a grueling job.

The mercenary life was a rough one, but a good stepping stone. When he'd sickened of the death and desperation and self-serving agendas, he'd quit and got himself onto the better side of the moral divide: fighting for country instead of money. He did well in the SAS, his willingness to follow the orders of good commanders letting him sail through the early obstacles typically thrown in the way of recruits. His experience with the darker side of military life left him with no qualms about tendering his obedience to leaders who, while they weren't always on the side of the angels, did usually try earnestly to fulfill their mandates with as little collateral damage as possible.

Not that zero-damage was always possible, of course, but that was the accommodation with himself every soldier had to make, whatever field he fought on. And he was a good soldier.

Following orders was no problem as long as he believed in the person giving them. Idealists and independents didn't last long in the elite ranks, and he'd never wasted much thought on them as they came and went. Ultimately, they left nothing but a ghostly squawk to mark their transience.

Until Cowley'd saddled him with Doyle, who was doggedly idealistic and obstinately independent. Hell, just all-round fucking stubborn. A shorthand dictionary could just put "Doyle" under "stubborn" and all would be clear.

Doyle, blast him, muddied the waters. Doyle reminded him in an absurd way of his long-dead da, who hadn't died of stubbornness or in some grand idealistic gesture, but of bad luck and bad seas on a simplistically mundane trip across the Atlantic. Anyway, he could barely remember his da, other than the smiling photos in the family album, one of which he'd filched when he left home and still kept in his flat, hidden in Donne's _Elegies_ , so it defied all logic to mix up the vividly alive Doyle with the fading image of a dead man who left no mark on the world other than Bodie himself and his mum's tears.

It was just that he'd have followed his da anywhere, through fire or hail or over the top of a volcano, across the vast oceans in a dinghy or crawling through a swamp on his knees, if only he'd come back and crooked his finger. And he followed Doyle like that, like nobody else he'd ever known in all his varied life.

Whether Doyle crooked his finger or not, he'd follow. Didn't always agree with Doyle, naturally; but that's not what it was about. Doyle wasn't Cowley or his old SAS colonel or that first captain who'd set him on the right path, the rough, hard, narrow path that'd helped keep him safe all these years in the worst of circumstances.

Doyle kept him safe in all the unplumbed areas he'd ignored through the years: the emotional parts of him that still secretly longed for his dead father and his mother's equally dead laughter; witless childish desires he'd done away with long ago. Only not, apparently, as permanently and successfully as he'd thought.

Because Doyle brought it all back in a tsunami of feeling: the warmth, the caring, the sense of belonging and being wanted and fitting, not because he was a good killer, not because he excelled at following orders, not because he was pragmatic and willing to bend to fit iffy situations, but because Doyle refused to relinquish a single iota of his optimistic belief in the goodness of poor sods like Mickey Hamilton and doomed young Benny.

No matter how often Doyle's attempts to shield people ended in their deaths nonetheless, Doyle never stumbled, not even a little, in his damned refusal to write people off the next time; to just follow orders, do the job, and not get himself tied up in knots _caring_. He'd rage and knock things about when matters went sickeningly awry, those times when they followed the orders and accomplished the mission, but nevertheless ended up with another bullet-riddled body at their feet. Yet when the next Diana Molner was delivered into their care, Doyle flamed with determination not to let the evil buggers win _this time_.

But the evil buggers always did win, didn't they. One way or another. His and Doyle's wins, Cowley's triumphs, were often as not slimed by shady behind-the-scenes politics or covert machinations of one sort or another. And, each time, Doyle raged and swore and threatened, but never actually quit. Never changed, either, though--crucially. He never would. Doyle was always going to be the same illogical, annoying idealist who refused to view people, whether they were innocents to protect or villains to find and stop, as pegs on a board or pawns or irretrievably black. Like Mickey Hamilton, the killer of three doctors:

_Still, somebody should have helped him before._

_Maybe nobody could have._

_I don't believe that._

Which was Doyle in a nutshell: he simply refused to see the world in black-and-white. Doyle's world was a dizzying spectrum of greys, as heaving and changeable and striated, sometimes-dangerous/sometimes-gentle, as the Merseyside waters Bodie'd grown up beside, as the vast, chancy North Atlantic depths on which he'd sailed to early manhood.

Which led Bodie to the inevitable crossroads, those points he couldn't avoid where he had to choose: follow orders or protect what was most important to him.

Cowley had expressed his displeasure at length and at volume the last time the choice-that-wasn't-any-bleeding-choice had come up, at the end of the Ojuka business when he'd ignored Cowley's direct orders not to breach the perimeter ahead of time, no matter what:

_I'll have no heroics on Doyle's behalf, Bodie. Is that clear?_

He'd said _Yes, sir_ as expected: except Doyle had been in there, tied up. Vulnerable. Close to possible death for the sake of the mission. It'd been as simple as that.

Just like now. They had Cowley's strict order not to break cover; no exceptions, no excuses. But Doyle was down, hands tied behind his back with wire that had already made his wrists bloody, his face pressed into the wet cobblestones. The thug kneeling on Doyle's back had reached inside his jacket for the concealed shoulder holster, seeming to move in slow motion. It was like watching through a pool of water, wavery, unreal, knowing Doyle's blood and brains would soon be spattered on the street and his body kicked unceremoniously into the canal. Then Bodie and the thug would return to Maguire, the boss, and Bodie would continue his secret, meticulous gathering of evidence to put the megalomaniacal murderer away for the rest of his natural, scabrous life. At the same time, they'd corral the rest of the members of the OFH, his Organisation for a Free Homeland, the founding of which for some obscure reason required the blowing up of random English citizens to drive the point home that his way was the best way.

All had been going to plan with the mission till somebody Doyle'd busted back in the Met caught sight of him and blabbed to Maguire, which ended up with Bodie and the thug ordered to deal with the problem, nice and quiet like. Cowley would not be best pleased at losing one of his best agents.

Though it wouldn't be Doyle. Not today, anyroad.

In seconds, Bodie disarmed the thug, knocked him out, and unwound the wire, slippery with blood, from the wrists of a spitting, raging Doyle. As soon as he was free, Doyle leapt to his feet; if he were a cat, his hair would all have been standing up on end and his tail would be puffed up to twice its size. Bodie smiled grimly at the image.

"Well, that's cut things up nicely." Doyle stared down at the thug's thick, lax body.

Bodie's eyes fixed on the blood dripping from Doyle's wiry wrists. He liked to close his hand around one of Doyle's wrists, feeling the comfort of the strong thud of Doyle's pulse, the warmth of his skin, the thrill of holding a piece of Doyle captive, if ever so briefly: like the startling wonder when a bird lighted on your hand for a few precious seconds before escaping into its rightful place in the wild again. Sometimes, after sex both hard and tender enough to knock them both into a stunned state, Doyle let Bodie capture his wrist, caging him in his grip till Doyle got his breath back and his muscles relaxed and his pulse slowed to steady and sure.

They weren't sentimental, he and Doyle, but Doyle liked to tuck Bodie's head under his chin and hold him close while their breathing slowed and their sweat dried on their skin, and Bodie liked to encircle Doyle's birdlike wrist and feel the flutter of the wild thing momentarily at rest in his safe clasp.

"Oi." Doyle's voice brought Bodie's eyes up to meet his. "I don't think you were supposed to do that, mate. The Cow is going to have the proverbial, to coin a phrase."

"That bastard was going to kick you into the canal like so much rubbish." His own voice sounded in his ears cold as the sleet dripping down his neck.

"Yeh, he was, wasn't he." Doyle sighed, then looked down and shook blood from his wrists, holding them away from his jeans, though they were already striped with red. "But we've bolloxed the whole thing up now. You can't go back to Maguire, not without the lout here."

Bodie said, moodily, "We could always kick _him_ into the canal."

Not actually a viable option, unfortunately; Doyle would never go for it.

Doyle didn't even bother to acknowledge the suggestion. He took a deep, slow breath, let it out in a rush, then squared his shoulders.

"Right, nothing for it, we'd best call it in. Maguire'll be making enquiries soon. Knowing Cowley and his bloody triple think, I won't be surprised if he has a back-up team ready to go, just in case we mucked it up, and he'll be wanting to get on with it." He gave Bodie a narrow stare. "Stop looking so glum. Dumping this bastard at the Cow's feet like an offering might convince him to forgive you...eventually. If not, if we end up having to leave, we'll find something else that suits us. Stuffed full of all sorts of handy skills, the two of us, thanks to CI5 and the Met and your lot."

Bodie looked up to meet Doyle's eyes, their murky green depths warm in contrast to his acerbic voice. Bodie took a step towards him.

"Us?"

Doyle rolled his eyes as Bodie took another step closer. "Of course _us_ , you big dolt. You wouldn't last a week without me."

Bodie took one last step till he was close enough to close his fingers around Doyle's left wrist. He kept his hand loose, not touching Doyle's torn flesh, but the circle of his fingers formed a complete ring.

"What am I saying? You wouldn't last a day." A smile touched Doyle's mouth and eyes and he held still in Bodie's hold, close enough for Bodie to smell his sweat, their eyes locked, for an entire handful of heartbeats.

Then the prisoner stirred on the ground beside them and Doyle gently pulled his hand away, Bodie's clasp immediately loosening.

As Bodie hoiked the heavy lout up and prepared to drag him to the car--Doyle opting out of helping on the grounds of being wounded and the situation being all Bodie's fault, anyway--a grin spread across Bodie's face like a burst of sunshine despite the rain still pissing down.


End file.
